From the Darkness of Our Villages

A story from the very heart of life

We were two friends; we had known each other since youth, and we were joined by kindred ideas and ideals we imagined easy to achieve, within near reach. We wondered how people could stand before them, either enthusiastic yet idle, or indifferent to them altogether — so we resolved to face them: my young friend and I.

We began by giving the needy whatever clothes and coins we found at hand; then our idealism began to grow and swell, and we decided it should take the form of giving lessons to our housemaids at home. We began without hesitation, and my friend would pass on to me her program of instruction and set her pupil to reading. I would tell her of the difficulty I met in making my pupil turn her attention to the lesson rather than the housework — which roused my father's and mother's anger against me, and my brothers heaped every kind of mockery on me until they named us "Plato and Aristotle," saying: tomorrow the pupil will outstrip her teacher!

The years passed and we outgrew the collar of fervent idealisms — after I had left behind me an ignorant girl who had learned. As for my friend, she left behind her an awakened girl whom learning had only made more wretched and sorrowful.

For her masters' house had raised her until she reached twenty years of age; then her family came and took her back to the village, to begin a life that fate had written for her in its black letters. My friend heard nothing more of her — she even forgot that blessed result embodied in a bright village mind. But one day she came to visit me with a letter in her hand; she unsealed it and said: Here, read it — it is from my pupil, from Khadija. And I read:

My friend, madam —

I do not know whether it is fitting to address you thus, or whether I should say: my lady, my friend. But you, my lady, were too noble to be a mistress to me in the sense people intended when they divided us into masters and slaves; in that you were the best of human beings and the very model of a friend.

In my heart are sorrows I stagger under their weight, and in vain would I hope for release with anyone but you — so hear them, for I know what an echo they will find in your soul.

My family has taken me back to them — my poor village folk, who spend their day in heavy toil that people like you know only as a softened fancy in the bellies of books! They took me back, and folded away with my clothes the reading books they marveled at, thinking them yours, taken without your knowledge. I assured them they were mine, and that they had come to mean a great deal to me. But my simple family paid me no mind and supposed I was stuffing out empty talk.

My family took me back to them — would that they had not! My life with them is a hell my feelings feed with fire. When they talk, I am oppressed by their loud voices, their coarse words, and the things they talk about; when they laugh, I wonder at the triviality that stirs their laughter and at the shrieking guffaws and din that fill it. When they turn serious I see nothing that calls for it, and when they incline to merriment I cannot join them in it. See, then, what a chasm has come to divide me from those nearest to me!

My family took me back to them — would that they had not! For you helped me see life as a wellspring of beauty in the village, when you would read to me what the villages have inspired in the poets, adorning in my imagination the pauses by the brook, the wandering among the flowers of the hills, and the magic of springs in the shade — coloring before my eyes the rays of

the sun as they kiss the mountains' brows in the dawn of the mountain village.

You helped me turn toward those mountains; but in my village I see only cold hollows and dark huts and abandoned pathways. My village is drowned in darkness — who will wipe away our misery?

You helped me approach people with the key of goodness; you made lovely to me the love of giving, the love of the gift that comes back with no favor claimed and no harm. And before my eyes the people of my village scramble over the loaf, fight over water, and make enemies of one another over a few grapes or a basket of figs.

Night in my village is desolate and dismal, lit by faint lamps; and the weddings in my village are more desolate than any night, for in them the child of ten is given in marriage to the man of thirty; in them the ring of joy is like wailing, and even the sweet dabkeh — no steps keep its order.

The people of my village have begun to suspect me — the secret of my silence amid their clamor, my solitude amid their gatherings, my reading while they drudge at labor and toil. As for my family, they have begun to fear me — to fear the devil who, they were told, must have possessed me after some fright or shudder. So the village folk advised them to lower me into a deep well, my head hung down, to the basmala of the village sheikhs and the trilling of the women.

I proposed to the people of my village that they send me their children to teach without payment; but they paid me no heed, and their boys followed me, pelting me with stones!!

My lady: you wished me nothing but good, all good; yet you sent me misery from where you never intended and never knew. If you would repeat the experiment a second time, muster for it a great number of women workers of good, to carry on teaching on a comprehensive scale throughout my poor village.

I folded the letter — and there was my friend, pressing my hand and saying: We shall muster the doers of good.

★

But while I was leafing through the evening paper, I came upon a murder; I had scarcely finished reading it when the news struck me like a thunderbolt:

My God! It was she — Khadija, killed by her brother's dagger when she refused to marry her cousin.

I went to my friend, and no sooner did she see me than a tear started from her eye and she said: I have brought this upon her!!